'Dirty Dancing' super-fan interviews its creator
"Dirty Dancing" has been my favorite movie for as long as I can remember.
As a teenager in the 90s, while other girls taped posters of Leonardo DiCaprio on their walls, I hung a framed poster of the 1987 movie in my bedroom. I had painted the walls the same shade of purple used in the movie's scrawling title. I was convinced there was a good chance I might someday marry Patrick Swayze. I was also terrible at math.
Beyond the soulful music and the sensual dance numbers, I loved "Dirty Dancing" because it spoke to me. I don't know if you've ever been a teenage girl, but it can be terribly confusing. Over and over, I watched the film's lead character Frances "Baby" Houseman, played by Jennifer Grey, navigate her way from a young girl to a woman. Could a woman be attractive and a bookworm? What does it mean to do the right thing? Can you change the world and stay daddy's girl? Baby helped me make some sense of it all.
But it wasn't Baby. It was Eleanor Bergstein, the woman who created the hit film that no one in Hollywood wanted to make.
She is also the creator of the stage adaptation, "Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story on Stage," which comes to Indianapolis at Clowes Memorial Hall June 9-14.
I spoke with Bergstein by phone about the stage performance, which has been playing around the world since 2004, and the film that helped me decide the kind of woman I wanted to be.
Before we get started, it's only fair to tell you that I'm one of those people who have seen the film hundreds of times. My mom said she used to plop me down in front of it when I was a baby because she noticed when it was on, I was completely entertained. But it took me until I was about 13 years old to really know what was happening beyond the music and dancing.
"You must have a very liberal mom. I think even 13 is young to get it."
The music and dancing is what sucks people into the film but there are also some really important underlying issues in the plot. Do those remain in the stage production?
"Oh, you're winning my heart. One of the great pleasures through the years is that people your age are saying 'Now I realize there's something else going on there (in the film) that has shaped my attitude today.' That was something I never expected. Those subtexts were buried, and I hoped that someday somebody would see it and maybe not change an attitude but reinforcing an instinct. When I did it, in 1987, about 1963, I wanted to remind people Roe v. Wade existed, because people thought that was a past battle. There were young men going across the world to fight in wars they didn't want to, and it was Martin Luther King's speech and I thought race issues had in some ways started to be dumbed-down. As we go across the country now, I couldn't be sadder because it turns out that these things haven't begun to be resolved."
It was the first time I ever heard the phrase "Freedom Ride." Later when I learned what a Freedom Ride was, it clicked there was a lot more going on in the film than I had realized when I was young.
"There was a lot I had to cut for the film because it's 90 minutes, and the show is two hours. You will understand immediately that one-third of it is new scenes. If you don't know the film or saw it 25 years ago, you wouldn't know. I tried to make them so seamless.
A lot of the reason I set the film in '63 was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. That's the exact date that in August they're at Kellerman's when that happened. The parents got Baby to come because she wanted to go to Washington, and everybody was afraid there would be violence there.
Occasionally I get a comment that absolutely just rocks me back in my heels. Someone will say, 'Why is civil rights in there? In '63 nobody was talking about it.' And I think 'Wow, in liberal New York, it was all anybody talked about. Maybe in your town you didn't know it was going on but we sure did.' The first time it happened it took my breath away."
I also learned what an abortion was by watching the movie.
"It's exactly why I used the language 'dirty knife, folding table,' otherwise your generation would think, 'Oh, she's just gone to Planned Parenthood and something went wrong. The movie takes place 10 years before Roe v. Wade, and when the movie came out it was 14 years later, and they didn't remember it.
There was an article in the Times when there was a big abortion rally in Washington about a year ago and there was apparently a young man who went up to a woman holding a placard and said, 'What exactly is a coat hanger abortion?' and she snapped, 'Haven't you seen 'Dirty Dancing?'
When the movie was about to come out, the company that thought it was a piece of junk anyway said, 'We have a national sponsor, but they don't want the abortion scene. Can you take it out?' and I said, 'I would be so happy to do that, but I can't because its the reason for the whole plot. You take that away it all falls apart. I'm so grateful that you saw those things."
The scenes that were added to the stage production, were those scenes that you had always wanted in the film?
"I wrote a lot of new scenes. That's why, as much as it irritates me, it also makes me smile that people think every word originated in the film. I did it seamlessly. Most scenes were written for stage show, not things I took out of the scrap heap from the film.
That's what so interesting about articles now, especially English columnists are writing a series of articles about 'Dirty Dancing' from the abortion, civil rights, the Vietnam war approaching, they all say it helped shaped their attitudes growing up and that's such an unexpected pleasure for me.
It's no secret that the film had its challenges from selling the script to the budget and the weather. What's it like, with the success of the film and the show, to look back on that time?
"Our expectations were so low, I expected to never be able to walk down the street without people laughing at me. So to watch people walk out of the show is a great pleasure. You can tell the difference between people who really love to dance and people who have never moved that way before and are inspired. I will be grateful for that forever. It has been life changing to physically stand all over the world and see people connect to this. It is so joyful.
I have a story. After the film came out, the studio sent me a video. It was of this little girl with Down syndrome. When she was born, they told the mother to just put her away. She would never be able to walk, talk or dress herself. But her mother said after she held her baby, she couldn't do that.
When you said your mother plunked you down, it made me think of this. One day the mother sat the girl down while the film was playing thinking it would occupy her for a few minutes. She watched the entire video, and when it was over she got up and kissed Patrick on the screen. She watched it over and over again and with the help of her teacher — she's the real hero — she learned to talk, walk and dress herself.
Later, some TV show brought her to meet Patrick in Chicago. She went running toward him and he picked her up in a lift and this two-year-old had such focus and precise joy it changed my whole perception of Down Syndrome children and any children.
Years later I got a phone call from her mother saying, 'Thank you for saving my child's life.' That is life changing. I'm so lucky I was a part of something that could have an affect like this. I haven't talked about this in 20 years."
To this day, when I do or say something awkward, I mumble the famous line, "I carried a watermelon." Then of course, there's "Nobody puts Baby in a corner," but I understand you just thought that was like any other line in the script. Do you have any favorite lines?
"Patrick didn't want to say it, but because we were very good friends he did. I can't say enough what a good man he was. I refused to do any interviews when he died because I didn't want to sell tickets off the death of someone I loved. Now I'm sorry I didn't do any interviews because everyone talked about how good looking he was, how sexy he was, but the most attractive thing about Patrick was that he was a very good person, and that's the most important thing, is that he was a good man. I'm saying that very vehemently now anytime I can.
He said, 'Do you really want me to say this?' I said what I always said when we had a conflict of any kind, 'Do it once and if it doesn't work we'll take it out but do it once with your whole heart.' We only had one take of it and we used it.
The line that means the most to me and gets the most letters is, 'Most of all I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I'm with you.'
I think everybody has a moment in their life, in their future, their past, or their hoped for future when everything hinged on doing this or that, and they hope to do the brave thing or their life boomerangs back to that moment where they didn't do it. A moment in your life when you think, if I don't do this I will wonder the rest of my life what would be if I had. Or if it hasn't come, what will I do when it arrives?
A woman wrote to me — this often makes me cry — 'I went with my parents to the Catskills and I fell in love with my dance teacher, Johnny, and I didn't know what had happened until you wrote about him. Tell me, is he happy, is he OK? I always knew it wouldn't last with him because you see he is a very tall person and I am very small.'
I answered and said, 'You're not a small person. I'm afraid it's not your Johnny, but I'm sure he always remembered you and when he sees the movie is thinking about you.'"
Why did you finally decide to do a stage production of the film?
"The thing you have on stage and not on screen is that you can watch it over and over again but you always run into the screen. When it's looping on TV from 8 a.m. to midnight, they found that instead of living their lives, people stop what they're doing and watch it over and over again. I tried to figure out why that is and I think it's because they wanted to be there while it was happening. You want to see somebody your size, in the moment, and that's what we couldn't have in the movie."
The casting of Patrick Swayze as "Johnny" and Jennifer Grey as "Baby" is well known due in part to reports of them not getting along on a project prior to "Dirty Dancing," but also thanks to their incredible on-screen chemistry in the film. Is that chemistry something you had hoped to find when casting the stage production?
"Sam (Samuel Pergande plays the role of Johnny Castle) is a Joffrey dancer and working-class boy. The story with Johnnies is always the same, somebody comes to me in motorcycle boots, and I say have you ever seen the movie 'Dirty Dancing,' and they say, 'Oh yeah, that's the whole reason I became a dancer.'
Johnny always had a crack inside him so I need a wild boy with a crack inside him — Patrick had that.
When we first started casting, you'll have to forgive me for how stupid this was, it had not occurred to me that everybody who had come in had seen the movie hundreds of times. The last time I casted, Johnny didn't exist, we just had the page. So they were copying Patrick or they were trying not to be Patrick. I was so startled. It had not entered my mind — they came in drenched in the movie. It probably took me four days of auditions to figure out what was going on."
Did that create a challenge?
"It wasn't a challenge for Johnny. I knew what I needed: a major dancer with hooded eyes, not a John Travolta type, 'Love me because I'm adorable,' someone with lots of testosterone, aggressive, claim-their-masculine-space dancer, someone with a cracked, wild heart. You can't teach that."
I used to make my little brother dress up and dance with me and practice the lift scene in our hot tub.
"You did?! I often meet the Baby's brothers, and they're always annoyed with me. In London, one Baby's brother really didn't seem to like me, and I found out he broke his wrist doing the lift with his sister and couldn't do a soccer championship when he was 9 years old. I hope if I ever meet your brother he doesn't dislike me."
Why do you think the show has been a success?
"Standing in the lobby after I show, I find what I hear people say the most is, 'I'm so relieved.' Relieved such a strange word, I thought. But I realized it's they came hoping so much that A) they were afraid they might be disappointed; B) they were afraid they might no longer love something they'd always loved; or C) they came looking for something, they didn't know what it was but they got it.
The music. Let's talk about that. I listen to the soundtrack regularly.
"Solomon Burke wrote to me and said (the film) changed his life. 'Cry to Me' was an unknown song, but not to me. These songs came from my old 45s. I remember when the studio tried to take all my music away from me and they said, 'This music's nostalgic, Eleanor. Nobody knows this song except his mother.' And I said, 'I don't care, I know it,' and I crawled on broken glass to get all of this music. They wanted to use 'For Your Precious Love.' I said for 'God's sake, no!'
What's interesting is they didn't put it on the first soundtrack, or 'Do You Love Me,' and then they found people went into the theaters with their Walkmans so they could record it. People were so upset it didn't have it on there. They put it on the second record.
The music is now well-known as the music of 'Dirty Dancing,' but when I made the film in '87 it had disappeared and nobody wanted to use it. I made these little cassettes with the music that I sent around with the script. The executives would write to me, and not that they liked the script, but they had worn out the cassette and would I send them another one. Now those little cassettes that say 'EB's Dirty Dancing' are collector's items, but if you have it that means you turned down the film."
I understand you're also working on a new stage musical. What's that about?
"It's set in London in the late 60s when all of the American black music was coming into London through Liverpool and then re-made, as the English will be the first to say, by The Kinks, the Yardbirds. It's about a young American living there and trying to decide if he should go home to face the draft. He comes from the south and hears this music in the new England that he's exploring."
Call Star reporter Leslie Bailey at (317) 444-6094 and follow her on Twitter @Lesalina, Facebook.com/Lesalina, and Instagram @Lesalina.
Want to go?
WHAT: "Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story on Stage."
WHEN: June 9-14.
WHERE: Clowes Memorial Hall, 4602 Sunset Ave.
TICKETS: Starting at $28.
INFO: (800) 982-2787, BroadwayinIndianapolis.com.